So quite a long one for my first post, but I felt inclined to chime in here. I think a lot of this will come about due to biomedical technological advances.

Let me explain...

In countries dominated by extremist Islamic governments, women are required to wear head coverings. It is a public indicator of control. Everyone can easily see if you are following the rules or not. Even if you personally do NOT believe you as a woman should have to wear a head covering, you do anyway because you don't want to get shot, and thus you still help maintain the status quo.

I think conversely, religion in the United States has been helped by this NOT being present. You can go to your extremist nutjob right-wing speak-in-tongues church on Sunday, and then show up to your office on Monday morning without there being any physical evidence for the lunacy you just participated in and endorsed, because as nutso as some churches are the tradition on Christianity is not to have to wear anything specific to stay in compliance in public.

As technology advances faster and faster, human progress in my opinion will become more and more at odds with the church's archaic teachings. You think they don't like contraception because it doesn't follow "natural law." Wait until you are hybridizing your immune system, putting artificial red blood cells in yourself, using LED retinal implants that make your eyes glow in the dark, extending your life through genetic therapy, custom programming fetuses to not have birth defects, etc. etc. The advantage that someone doing these things will have in day to day life over a "natural" human will be astounding. Not only that, it will be readily apparent in public that you are telling the church to go to hell by directly participating in things that they don't approve of.

In the past, various religions have taken new technology, etc, and eventually adapted it into their canon, albeit slowly, in order to remain relevant. However, in the future I don't think they will be able to keep up. I think in general things that are directly at odds with their teaching will move so quickly they will not be able to adapt quickly enough. Right now you can be "in-line" with most religions without having to give up much personally. But what about in the future. Would you be willing to stay religiously devout if it meant your neighbor could run twice as fast and ten times as long as you, see in the dark, have children that are a hundred times more intelligent than yours, live for several hundred years, and never have to sleep?

This all may sound far fetched to some of you, but that just means you aren't reading a lot of research right now in my humble opinion.....two of the things mentioned here, artificial red blood cells and LED retinal implants will be here in the next 10 years. They are already using protein trasncriptors to alter people's DNA. My friend was CURED of a type of leukemia, by a type of therapy that fixed the error in his bone marrow DNA that was producing the problem. Just this last week they created a chimeric monkey that was a custom built combination of two separate embryos.